Dragonkeeper ★★

Released: 27 September 2024

Director: Salvador Simó and Li Jianping

Starring: Mayalinee Griffiths, Bill Bailey, Beth Chalmers

Dragonkeeper starts with a fascinating premise: a girl finding a dragon egg. As far as fantasy films go, there is not much more exciting than dragons for fans of the genre, especially in an animation format allowing for experimentation in the design and rendition of these mythical creatures. Seemingly off to a good start, yet there was not much for me to look forward to once I started watching the film. When looking at the genre at large, there are a lot of other films and media product that use similar tropes in a more fascinating and clever way.

Set in China during the time of the Han dynasty, Dragonkeeper follows a young girl named Ping (Mayalinee Griffiths). An orphan who was enslaved as a child, Ping is now living in a kingdom where dragons have been banished away and deemed untrustworthy. As she embarks on a journey to save Hua, her rat friend, Ping will discover one of the last remaining dragon eggs in the kingdom. As the mission to save all dragons from extinction rests on her shoulders alone, Ping will have to fight for her life and fulfil her destiny in the meantime.

The most impressive element of the entire film are the dragons. In many ways, the existence of the dragons alone is the driving force of the movie as the story quite literally starts with one. The inherent fascination that these creatures evoke in the audience certainly helps the subject matter, although the film could have explored the rich mythology and tradition. Visually, they particularly stand out due to their wondrous animation, a welcome change from the rest of the movie which soon ends up looking – and feeling – too flat and uninteresting from both an aesthetic and thematic point of view. While it might seem like a small detail, I also didn’t particularly love the choice of making the dragons talk with human voices, quickly taking away a lot of their mystery and otherworldliness.

Unfortunately, Dragonkeeper focusses a lot more on trying to re-create the tried and tested Disney formula of a female heroine accompanied by a talking animal rather than actually relying on the elements that would have made it unique. In this sense, I would have loved to see the Chinese myths that serve as inspiration for the story used more, making it far more original and, therefore, more interesting for the audience to see. Instead, the film almost seems to use it exclusively to establish its inciting incident and then moves on too quickly, falling into the trap of only treading on a familiar and safe road.

Ultimately, many of the problems with Dragonkeeper are within its writing. From the very beginning of the film, the stakes are virtually non-existent. The protagonist seems to be able to withhold anything that comes her way, without any need for training nor struggle to acquire any of the abilities she seems to naturally possess. Equally, she can also survive any threat, managing to heal and survive even the unlikeliest circumstances, leaving the audience never really feeling like she is ever in danger and ending up caring far less about her fate and wellbeing. Admittedly, I also watched the English-dub version which did not help my reception of the movie. Not only should films always be watched in their original language, but the dubbing in this case is particularly uninspired and, at times, out of place.

Overall, Dragonkeeper fails to deliver on an exciting premise, making it an easily forgettable film. In the last few years, animation has increasingly stepped up in terms of visuals, by allowing the audience to travel to exciting different words with every new film. The same can be said for the plots and themes of these movies that are now catering to a more adult audience, finally leaving behind the antiquate idea that animations are just for kids – films like Elemental (2023) or Inside Out easily prove this – making this film especially disappointing for what it has clearly failed to do.